Blood, sand and swooning fans (From Borehamwood Times)

Blood, sand and swooning fans

10:50am Friday 1st May 2009

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PAUL WELSH says goodbye to two stars behind the camera and remembers a Hollywood heart-throb from the Thirties who kept a few skeletons in the closet.

Sad to start off by reporting on the loss of two more cinema veterans who were great names behind the camera.

Ken Annakin died aged 94 and is best remembered for directing Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines and Swiss Family Robinson.

The second loss is cinematographer and director Jack Cardiff who was also 94. Jack started as a clapperboy at Elstree in the late Twenties and once told me: “I was lodging in a house opposite the studios in 1936 when the adjacent B&D Studio burned down during the night. Ronald Neame and myself rushed out and saved some cameras and we actually shot some footage of the fire but I don’t know what happened to it.”

Jack was a cinematographer on films such as The African Queen and shot several Elstree movies including Master of Ballantrae with Errol Flynn. He gained a reputation as an expert colour cameraman, was a favourite of Marilyn Monroe’s and also directed three films at MGM in the Sixties.

Jack was our guest of honour at the Elstree film evening in the mid-Nineties and the last time we met was shortly after Elstree re-opened and he volunteered to help a student film and trainee crew.

It was a First World War short film and the mound at the back of the studio had been converted into war trenches. It was a cold night but Jack, even in his 80s, was still agile and keen to pass his knowledge onto a future generation. The film was called The Dance Of Sheba and I remember Kenneth Branagh, Paul McGann and tennis player Pat Cash volunteering to play roles. I wonder whatever became of it?

This week our memory lane trip is to recall a movie hearthrob of the Thirties and Forties named Tyrone Power. He had female fans swooning after The Mask of Zorro, Blood and Sand, and Jesse James. He married three times and had three children but also had relationships with male friends such as fellow actor Ceasar Romero who later became famous as the Joker in the Sixties Batman TV series.

Naturally the studio and the press kept this private in an era when such revelations would have ruined a career.

Tyrone wanted to be more than a pretty face and in the Fifties spent more time on stage including a tour of England in Mister Roberts. He became disenchanted with Hollywood and turned down From Here to Eternity but was persuaded to return to the screen in a leading character role in Agatha Christie’s Witness For The Prosecution. By this time his boyish good looks had faded, but he remained popular.

In 1958 he went to Madrid to star in the epic Solomon and Sheba and while on location, did a TV advert for the American Heart Foundation. Shortly after while filming a tough duelling scene opposite George Sanders he collapsed with chest pains. Tyrone was taken to his caravan, became worse and, while being driven to hospital, died of a heart attack at the age of only 44.

When I last visited Hollywood, I visited his grave which is close to that of legendary film director Cecil B DeMille. Apparently fans still hold a remembrance ceremony on the anniversary of his death. Coincidentally, the only other such ceremony takes place at the same cemetery and that is for Rudolph Valentino who starred in the Twenties version of Blood and Sand.

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